


Refusal

by ArdeaWrites



Series: Resonant Crowbar [3]
Category: Half-Life
Genre: Aliens, Canon-Typical Violence, Freeman goes to war, Gen, Mercenaries, Teleportation, a hundred ways to die, between half life 1 & 2, exactly what is an unwinnable battle to Freeman, the G-man doesn't take rejection kindly, time loops, what happens when the offer is refused
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-26
Updated: 2019-12-26
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:28:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21973585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArdeaWrites/pseuds/ArdeaWrites
Summary: What happens when Freeman refuses the G-Man's offer? Is there such a thing as an "unwinnable battle" to Freeman, after Black Mesa? And what happened during those twenty years? Freeman didn't age, but that doesn't mean he didn't move forward. He didn't accept the job offer, not at first, but the G-Man isn't much for fair choices. Shades of Edge of Tomorrow.
Series: Resonant Crowbar [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1855192
Comments: 5
Kudos: 67





	Refusal

He’d said no.

He hadn’t _spoken_ the words, because no power on earth or heaven or places beyond would make Gordon Freeman speak aloud, but his answer had been clear. He’d dropped all his weapons but the revolver, and that he’d leveled at the Colleague. He didn’t know what else to call the grey-green man in the suit, so close but yet so wrongly inhuman. 

And he’d put every ounce of flat blank semi-sarcastic _NO_ into his expression. He had a good No face. It’d stopped a lot of laboratory hijinks, a handful of romantic overtures from the particularly young and naïve-they warned the interns about him now-and at least one attempt to dislodge him from his death grip on the HEV project. 

The Colleague understood. 

And had made good on the threat. 

A battle he couldn’t win. His reality was already crystallized down to a battle he couldn’t win. How was this any different? But he’d rather go fighting into darkness than take on a new master. He’d tasted the freedom that comes with singular purpose and a solid trigger and he wasn’t going back into someone else’s entourage. 

He’d gone down fighting. He’d slaughtered them by the dozens, by the hundred, was running low on ammunition and was fighting with the crowbar in his left hand and the stinger gun on his right, when three brutes had committed suicide by piling into him and and letting their dead weight hold him down. Another had reached for the neck of the suit through the pile of dead flesh he couldn’t shift and _twisted_ , and he’d felt the crack of vertebrae and the deep cold pull of knowing his own death… 

…and the train had resolved greenly around him, shivering its way through the void. 

The Colleague had laughed his dry, stony laugh and made his offer again. 

And again. 

And again. 

Freeman died. He was shot, he was pulled limb from limb. He was tossed from indeterminate heights in the alien citadel, or crushed by the organic building itself when he ran out of brutes to fight. Because he did, more than once, win the battle. 

“Are you getting tired?” the Colleague asked. “Would you like to rest?” 

Freeman was tired. 

He’d been tired since he’d gotten out of bed, back when the world was whole and all his fellow humanity was still alive for him to disdain. He didn’t regret disdain, or his arrogance, or his trust in his own intellect. Those things were part of him, and part of what made him a survivor. 

_I choose to live._

But this wasn’t living. 

Maybe this was death, trapped in an infinite loop of unsatisfying accomplishment. No matter what he did, the cycle reverted. A clever little knot in string theory? A microcosm in his own subconscious? Had any of it happened, the way the cascade had happened? 

His senses told him it had. The deep ache in his neck and the sharp pain in his chest, the way the suit rubbed him wrong and raw… something had happened. Some part of the loop was real. It was building up, wearing down, death by ant-bites. He couldn’t continue forever, but the Colleague would let him fight himself out until Freeman knelt at his feet or died there on the train, for real. Forever. 

He saw it in the Colleague’s eyes, that note of steel finality, and knew he might as well put the gun to his own temple. 

_Would you like to rest?_

He dropped the revolver. No, he wasn’t ready to rest yet. If the Colleage was the battle he couldn't win, then maybe out there somewhere was a battle he could. 

He stepped into the portal. 

Time did strange things in his head. Darkness happened, and light happened. The suit was gone. He twisted like a snake away from things that touched bare skin, overly sensitive after days of deprivation and pain. Old scars were reawoken and cut away. Parts were aligned correctly, like the broken bones in his arms and legs, and the rib he didn’t remember breaking. Pieces of metal and polymer sealed in his skin were drawn slowly out, each one testament to a moment’s unlikely survival. 

He missed the med box drugs. His mind wanted the distraction, wanted to trade intellectual confusion for chemical confusion, and the wet body craved its comfort. 

He met new battlefields. 

He slaughtered new things. 

He didn’t remember them, only the sense that they’d been there. He’d been sent to go and _do this._ He did his best work when given a brief direct order and left to figure the rest out himself. He liked creative freedom. It was on his performance review. 

Performance of what? He wanted to ask the Colleague, who delivered it in a parody of his own old laboratory office, with the Colleague seated in Freeman’s own chair while Freeman hovered like a green intern on uncomfortable folding metal. 

It didn’t matter. He’d lived. He’d upheld the Colleague’s expectations. 

Patched back together, stapled into shape, poured into an orange polymer carapace, embraced by the living black second-skin. He breathed easier with it around him. He remembered it, even when he didn’t remember the worlds he wore it on or the enemies it saved him from. 

But when he woke on the train station platform and breathed stale exhaust, sour grease and cigarette smoke, and felt the chill damp wind on his ears and ankles, he’d known something was different. 

Something was wrong. 

This was _real._

He was home. Naked, sore, confused, thirsty and weaponless. 

Home. 


End file.
